CVE-2018-18700 Denial of service in n/a

Medium 5.5 Published 27 Oct 2018 Updated 15 Oct 2026

Remote attackers can cause a denial of service via infinite recursion in GNU libiberty when processing malicious ELF files.

Exploited in the wild: Not known
Login needed: Not needed
Attackable: Local or same network only
Victim action needed: A user has to click or open something
Fix: Available

What is CVE-2018-18700?

CVE-2018-18700 is a medium-severity denial of service vulnerability in Gnu Binutils, published on 27 Oct 2018. It can only be exploited from the same machine or local network, and only if a user opens a file or follows a link.

Official description

An issue was discovered in cp-demangle.c in GNU libiberty, as distributed in GNU Binutils 2.31. There is a stack consumption vulnerability resulting from infinite recursion in the functions d_name(), d_encoding(), and d_local_name() in cp-demangle.c. Remote attackers could leverage this vulnerability to cause a denial-of-service via an ELF file, as demonstrated by nm.

Weakness: CWE-835

Which versions are affected by CVE-2018-18700?

It affects 1 product.

Products include Gnu Binutils.

How do I fix CVE-2018-18700?

Apply the vendor's patch.

Upgrade, then put limits on request size, rate and nesting depth so one client cannot exhaust the service. More about Denial of service.

Is CVE-2018-18700 being exploited?

There is no known exploitation of CVE-2018-18700 in the wild and no public exploit code.

All Gnu Binutils vulnerabilities

Sources

Also known as DEBIAN-CVE-2018-18700, GHSA-wgw9-xp6q-63v8, UBUNTU-CVE-2018-18700.